“Should you? Na, it is better that he should not ride too much in my saddlebag. He must go to you or Cei, and Cei will not know how to handle him.”
“Will he take so much handling?”
“Listen, Bedwyr; he was begotten in hate. It is a foul story, and save for Guenhumara, it is between myself and God — and in hate he was bred up by his mother, and held by her all these years. It is the only thing he truly understands; he is a stranger in the world, and at odds with it, because his mother never truly gave him birth until her own death tore him from her.” I was struggling for the words I needed. “He wants to get back to the warm darkness of his mother’s womb; and failing to escape from it, he will be revenged on the world if he can. How much of all that will Cei understand? Cei, whose idea of hating is a blow and a flare of sparks?”
“Whereas I . . . ?”
“I think that at least you know how to hate.”
“A strange recommendation.”
“Not so strange, since a man understands better in another the thing that he knows in himself. And may even have a surer mercy for it.”
“That sounds oddly like a counsel of love.”
“Love?” I said. “No, not love. But I remember also that Cei could never have ridden the Black One as you rode him.”
There was a silence full of the small sharp sounds of the camp about us, and then Bedwyr spoke again, with a curious cold stillness in his voice. And I realized that after all the years that we had been closer than most brothers, I still knew scarcely one thing about him that belonged to the time before Narbo Martius. “At least it is true that I know how to hate. I hated my mother. She drowned my bitch’s puppies before my eyes, and the bitch took the milk fever and died. I used to lie awake at night thinking of the different ways to kill my mother, and the only reason, I think, that I did not do it was that once it was done, I should not have it to look forward to. And then I grew to manhood, and I knew that I had left it too long and I should never kill my mother now. So I left home by the road to Constantinople, and you know the rest. . . . Yes, I’ll take the boy into my squadron.”
He never suggested that I should send Medraut away, as Guenhumara had done; but few men, I think, have the ruthless logic of a woman.
For a while Medraut’s coming was a subject for talk and jest around the watch fires, but the war camp had more pressing matters to occupy them than the Bear’s youthful wenching and its resulting bastard, and soon the thing was to all outward seeming as though it had never been otherwise. It seems strange now, that the ripples should have died so soon. . . . But indeed my son had an eye for country and an uncanny knack of blending into it which, on one level, enabled him to find and fortify a place for himself among us almost unnoticed (even Bedwyr, I think, was at times, and at first, scarcely aware of the new rider in his squadron) and on another, combined with a land of cold panache, aided him to swift success in the type of warfare which is carried on by ambush and foray. He began to get a name for being lucky to follow in battle, and that goes far with men who live with their swords in their hands; and so presently some of the young ones began to follow him.
He had plenty of opportunity to enhance his name among them in the next three years.
Three years of ebbing and flowing warfare, while the Barbarians clung onto Cantii Territory and the land strip between the South Chalk and the sea, unable to gain further ground in the face of Ambrosius’s troops; while more and more of the Sea Wolves swarmed into the old Trinovantian and Icenian lands; always, it seemed, a new skein of the tattered black war boats before each easterly wind, a new war camp or settlement springing up overnight in place of the one we had burned out in the morning. For the sea crossing is shorter in the South, and the Sea Wolves, it seemed, better combined and of more steadfast purpose, so that it was like trying to sweep back a river spate with a besom broom. And always, if we turned our backs for an instant in dealing with the flanking thrusts to the north or south, the settlers in the Tamesis Valley would put out another probing tentacle toward the heart of Britain.
For the most part, now that Ambrosius and I had again joined forces, the wolds and marshlands of the East Seax and Northfolk and Southfolk were my hunting grounds even up into Lindum Territory, where the Saxon inroads had begun again; while Ambrosius turned his forces against the Barbarian swarms south of the Tamesis. But as the years went by, Ambrosius himself took the field less and less often. He was High King as well as military commander; for him, not only to lead his troops in war, but to rule the broad central territory that was the heart and the ultimate fortress of Britain; and often affairs of kingship held him in Venta while other men led his war hosts on the outer frontiers. And so little by little the pattern between us changed and codified; and we were no longer sword brothers of a like kind, in our fighting, but he the Monarch and I, who had been the Count of Britain, the Rex Belliorum, the chosen war leader.
But all too often it was not the duties of kingship alone that kept Ambrosius prisoned in Venta. Increasingly, through those years, he was a sick man. One could see it in the gradual wasting of his flesh — he had never much to spare — in the yellowish color of his skin and the growing brilliance of his eyes, and the drawn look of his mouth which bespoke endurance. Those of us nearest to him could see it also, in the way he drove himself — not as one who rides a well-trained horse and rides him hard, but as one with the wolves behind him, lashing a spent beast. But at any suggestion that something was amiss, he simply laughed and went away into his own remoteness where other men could not reach him; and lashed himself the harder, afterward.
It was when we returned to winter quarters in the fourth autumn since we came south, and I saw the change that there was in him since I saw him last, that I asked Ben Simeon, his Hebrew physician, what ailed the High King. He looked at me under his brows, the dark luminous gaze brooding on my face, as he hitched his greasy old kaftan about his shoulders in the way that he had, and inquired, “How many of those nearest to the King have asked me that, do you suppose?”
“More than one, I imagine,” I said. “It so chances that we love him.”
He nodded. “So so, and all of them I have put off with answers that sound well and mean nothing. But you are in a son’s place to Ambrosius, and therefore it is right that you should know the truth. In Alexandria where I learned my trade, and where the priest kind have not yet made it a sin to explore the bodies of the dead for knowledge of the living, they call it the Crab Sickness.”
I did not know what he meant, and I said so.
“It is a thing, a very evil thing, that grows like a crab in the body; and sometimes it spawns into many of its own kind, and sometimes it remains but one; but either way it devours the body.”
I found it hard to speak through something that seemed to close my throat. “And is there no checking this thing?”
“None,” he said. “Neither by herbs nor by the knife. The secret of it is as deep beyond us as is the secret of life itself — or the secret of death.”
“Death,” I said. “Is that the end?”
“Whether the thing runs its course mercifully swift, or crawls through years of time, it is death in the end.”
I remember that I was silent for a while, drawing patterns on the beaten earth with the chape of my sword. Then I asked, “Does Ambrosius know?”
“One does not keep such news from the like of Ambrosius, with the work that he has in his sword hand, still to do, or to be passed on in good order to someone else.”